Galina Fyodorovna Romanova was born in 1918 in the Ukrainian village of Romankovo near Dnipropetrovsk, the daughter of a blacksmith. She had two younger brothers. As a schoolgirl she joined Komsomol, the youth organization of the Soviet Communist Party. In 1937 the Soviet secret service arrested her parents and she herself was expelled from the Komsomol. Galina Romanova began studying at the Dnipropetrovsk Medical Institute. Because of the beginning of the war she could not finish her studies at first. With a break she graduated in 1942.

On July 1, 1942, she was deported to Reich territory with other graduates of the Medical Institute. Galina Romanowa was a doctor in forced labor and took over the care of forced laborers in several Brandenburg barracks camps in Wildau and Oranienburg. With like-minded people she tried to organize Soviet forced laborers for resistance activities. Through an intermediary, contact was established with the Berlin doctor Georg Groscurth, a co-founder of the "European Union" resistance group. He supplied Galina Romanowa with medicines she lacked for the care of forced laborers. At the beginning of September 1943, the Gestapo arrested most of the German members of the "European Union" and shortly afterwards, in October, also the group around Galina Romanowa.

Galina Romanowa was sent to the Berlin women's prison Barnimstraße and was sentenced to death by the People's Court like 15 other members of the "European Union". Several petitions for clemency she wrote in prison were rejected. Galina Romanowa, then 25 years old, died on 3 November 1944 under the guillotine in Berlin-Plötzensee prison.